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TGIF&F Week: How the Fast & Furious films beat Hollywood in the race for ethnic diversityhttp://news.nationalpost.com/arts/how-the-fast-furious-films-beat-hollywood-in-the-race-for-ethnic-diversity
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That unmistakable smell of burnt rubber and Axe body spray in the air can only mean one thing — it’s time for another Fast & Furious movie. Although the latest film promises more high-speed, hyperbolic action scenes featuring tank top-wearing muscle-heads of both sexes, one successful element of the franchise’s history has been routinely overlooked: the fact that the Fast & Furious movies are the most ethnically diverse blockbusters of our day.

Starting with series headliner Vin Diesel — who says he’s of “ambiguous ethnicity” and was raised in a racially mixed household — and continuing with the prominence of The Rock, Tyrese Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez, Sung Kang and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, the films’ casts have prominently featured actors who may share well-toned physiques but otherwise represent a wider spectrum of skin tones than Hollywood usually permits. Furious 7 follows suit by augmenting its established cast of white, black and Hispanic actors with such newcomers as Bollywood hunk Ali Fazal, Thai martial arts star Tony Jaa and Nathalie Emmanuel, a Game of Thrones regular of mixed Caribbean heritage. (Jason Statham shows up, too, though “Cockney” is not yet considered an ethnic group on census forms.)

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This unusually inclusive tendency extends to the talent behind the camera. After 2 Fast 2 Furious — directed by black filmmaker John Singleton — the subsequent Fast & Furious movies were all the handiwork of directors of Asian descent, with Justin Lin (Nos. 3-6) ceding duties to the Malaysian-born Australian James Wan.

Even though one might hope this evidence represents a wider shift in Hollywood’s attitudes toward race and representation, it’s hard to tell whether the Fast & Furious phenomenon counts as a forerunner or outlier. While black performers enjoy greater prominence on North American screens, things haven’t changed so much given how often they’re relegated to sidekick roles for white superheroes (see Anthony Mackie in Captain America: The Winter Soldier) or disguised and exoticized as green-skinned aliens (see Zoe Saldana in Guardians of the Galaxy).

If you need further proof of the typically secondary status reserved for actors of colour in the blockbuster realm, consider the eruption of the blogosphere upon the discovery that John Boyega, a British actor of Nigerian heritage, won a central role in the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Maybe Hollywood would be further along the path to racial equality had George Lucas followed through with his original ambition of casting a black Han Solo.

The Fast & Furious movies are the most ethnically diverse blockbusters of our day

The stats that emerged in the latest major study of ethnic representation in Hollywood cinema aren’t encouraging, either. Researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California examined on-screen portrayals in 600 popular films released between 2007 and 2013. Of the 3,932 characters examined in the top 100 movies of 2013, a whopping 74.1% were white. And despite the widespread presumption that 2013 was a watershed year for African-American stories on screen — with the critical and commercial success of 12 Years a Slave,The Butler and 42 — the author’s study observed no meaningful change “in the frequency of any racial/ethnic group on screen in popular films between 2007 and 2013.”

Meanwhile, just five black male filmmakers were represented in 2013’s Top 100 movie hits. Over the six years and 600 films covered, only two black women figured in the study. As for the similarly negligible proportion of Asian-Americans, that may be changing with the increasing prominence of such directors as Lin, Jon M. Chu (G.I. Joe: Retaliation) and Cary Fukunaga (True Detective).

Other trends suggest that the rest of Hollywood had better catch up to the Fast & Furious franchise when it comes to reflecting the audience both in North America and in the international markets that now generate as much as 70% of a hit’s box office take. According to the MPAA’s own numbers, 54% of all movie tickets are bought by white moviegoers, even though they comprise 60% of the U.S. population. Increasingly distracted by other entertainment options, the young white males that Hollywood has long considered its most loyal customers are being overtaken by women (the driving force of three of 2015’s biggest movies so far: Fifty Shades of Grey, Cinderella and The Divergent Series: Insurgent) and Hispanics (the fastest-growing group of moviegoers in the United States).

Mike Faille

The Fast & Furious series’ eagerness to move beyond its original L.A. locations and test speed limits in other nations — Japan, Brazil, Mexico and Spain have all been used as settings — has further increased its uncommon degree of ethnic representation. As a consequence, the racial and cultural differences that many movies foreground for reasons both dramatic and comedic (see Get Hard — or don’t) are barely discernible. Even cross-racial romances — such as the pairing of Korean-American actor Kang and Israeli actor Gal Gadot in Fast & Furious Nos. 5 and 6 — that may be presented as risky in other films are par for the course.

It can all seem so post-Obama that the rest of Hollywood seems stuck in Reagan’s second term by comparison. Perhaps amid the usual barrage of squealing tires, explosions and six-pack abs in Furious 7, viewers will pause long enough to realize that they’re witnessing a new kind of big-screen utopia, one where it doesn’t matter what you look like — provided, of course, you’re young, hot and know how to drive stick.

In the furor over Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s criticism of in vitro fertilization and Elton John’s responding indignation, little has actually been said about the merits of different family structures and reproductive technology. It’s hard to fit serious arguments into 140 Twitter characters, and still less in the 20 of #BoycottDolceGabbana.

Elton John’s main complaint, echoed repeatedly on Instagram and Twitter, is that the designers’ “archaic thinking is out of step with the times.” The insult puts opposition to IVF firmly in the past, in the same neat category as bubonic plague and sun-worship, but timeliness is not really the same as truthfulness. Watches don’t tell right and wrong.

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It’s comforting to talk about staying on the right side of history, spurning the archaic and falling into step with the times, but the foundation of the argument is unstable. Soon the future will become the present, and not long after it will be past. The “right side” of history will already be behind us, and we’ll have to come up with an entirely new set of ideas to stay on the cutting edge.

If the new thing is progressive and the progressive thing is true, debate becomes a shouting match. In the mad rush to be the last and loudest voice, the newest idea or the hottest hashtag, tradition is devalued and the esoteric overvalued. The cutting edge had better be careful what it’s cutting.

Controversial questions cannot be reduced to simple matters of past vs present, old-fashioned vs progressive. If social movements and human rights are based only on what’s popular now, what hope is there of lasting change?

Even Barbara Kay, in her excellent column defending Dolce’s comments, seemed to suggest they were acceptable because the majority still agrees with them. Well, no. It is true that most people see a mother-father partnership as the ideal child-rearing team, but this is not why the discussion is worth having. Many or few, critics of IVF and same-sex parenting have worthwhile ideas to share, and even if we disagree, shutting them up makes us poorer. Hashtags are blunt instruments at best, and #BoycottDolceGabbana has none of the nuance that the issues of human rights and childcare deserve.

Anyone who has seen a five-year-old dress himself knows that children completely ignore adults’ ideas about style. Probably no one in the world cares less about keeping with the times. Kids live centuries in the past and in the future, playing knights, pioneers, and astronauts all at once. They care more about games that make them happy than games that make their parents hip.

If children’s health and happiness collides with parents’ popularity, the problem warrants serious discussion. Timeliness has no place in the conversation.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/rachel-ottenbreit-timeliness-has-no-place-in-dolce-and-gabbana-tirade/feed/0stdUS-ENTERTAINMENT-MUSIC-PEOPLE-ELTON-GAY-MARRIAGE-FILESFive books that would make great games: Why the next electronic adaptations should be literaryhttp://business.financialpost.com/financial-post/#
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When looking for lucrative intellectual property to exploit, game makers typically turn their gaze to the world of film rather than books.

You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to understand why.

Blockbuster movies are front and centre in pop culture, and it’s easy to imagine the cinematic sequences on the silver screen translated to the nearly equally cinematic medium of modern games.

But as an avid reader, I see possibilities for games lurking within the books I read at least as often as I see them in film. We need look no further than Larry Niven’s classic Ringworld, which clearly served as muse to Halo’s inventors at Bungie, for proof that game makers see potential in books as well.

Below are five novels I think could be transformed into immensely entertaining games. From Iain M. Banks’ 27-year-old sci-fi classic The Player of Games to Pierce Brown’s still-in-the-works Red Rising trilogy, I’d pay good money to play interactive versions of all of these books.

Minor spoiler alert: Best skip any blurbs pertaining to books you might want to read. I don’t give away any endings or twists, but I do get into some overarching plot details you might want to discover on your own while reading.

Earth Hour is today (March 28) from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. — the one hour we should all flick off our lights — and it’s a good reminder to make greener choices all the time, including with our lighting.

When it comes to “green” lights, we have a lot of choices. I’ve been going to all the home shows lately and the stuff I’ve seen, especially with LEDs, will blow you away.

Light fixtures for LEDs used to be very limited, but that’s no longer the case. There are dimmable LEDs, LEDs that change colours, and LED strips you can install below kitchen cabinetry and along stairs. There are also solar LEDs, LEDs for chandeliers and on and on.

It’s no secret my favourite green lights are LEDs. They save energy, and no other light lasts longer. On average, LEDs last about 25,000 hours. That’s 22 years. The runner-up, which is compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) — those light bulbs shaped like screws — last about 8,000 to 10,000 hours, which is less than half the average lifespan of an LED.

I have LEDs all around my house, inside and out, including on my deck, in my garage and along the exterior. We have even started using LEDs on set. But they’re expensive, and some families simply can’t afford to switch every single light they have to an LED right now.

So what do you do if you want to go green but you can’t afford LEDs? One strategy is to slowly make the switch.

For example, you might start by replacing the lights you use most often with LEDs so you get the biggest payoff on saving energy, and then later tackle bulbs in other fixtures. In the meantime, for those lights that are still waiting to be switched to LED, CFLs are a good alternative.

Unfortunately, CFLs have been taking a lot of heat in the news recently, which has made some people nervous about using them.

The issue is that CFLs contain a small amount of mercury in them — actually, mercury gas — as well as argon. (Inside CFLs is a coating of phosphor, and when electrically charged, the argon and mercury vapours collide with the coating of phosphor and this process produces visible light with very little heat.)

If we were to just throw CFLs in the garbage, there’s a really big chance they’ll get crushed, and then that mercury gas can escape into the air, ground and water.

But this isn’t news, or at least it shouldn’t be. That’s why we recycle CFLs — as we do batteries, paint and old cellphones. We don’t just throw these items in the garbage; they can contain hazardous materials, plus, in some cases, their parts can be recycled. Practically every part of a CFL can be recycled and reused.

So, are CFLs bad? No. They save a lot of energy, and since incandescent bulbs are being weaned off the market, CFLs are sensible options. But we have to be smart about the way we deal with them.

For example, any product that contains mercury should indicate that, or have the “HG” symbol on it. But it should be common knowledge how to get rid of these products safely or handle them safely if they break. Many municipalities have recycling programs and depots that take old CFLs, and some retailers — such as Canadian Tire (depending on where you live), Ikea and Rona — do too.

And depending on the province you live in, there might be recycling programs that specifically deal with CFLs, such as Ontario’s Take Back the Light and B.C.’s LightRecycle.

Also, ProjectPorchlight.com is a great resource for finding CFL recycling outlets.

The information is out there. Do your homework and spread the word. It’s the first step to make it right.

Watch Mike Holmes on Holmes Makes It Right on HGTV. For more information visit makeitright.ca.

When I was very young, my parents used to watch Mystery! on PBS. I was transfixed by the opening credits, an animation by the poet and illustrator Edward Gorey. I later sought out everything of his. Gorey combines verse with very dark and eerie illustrations, and something weird or horrible is always happening in his stories; someone’s always in peril. He’s probably the reason I started dying my hair black. He’s also inspired me in my own work; turns out I really do like the creepy stuff.

I’ve spent the past 15 years in the music industry — writing, travelling, performing — and through that I’ve collected lots of experiences that helped me write my book, Boring Girls, which centres on a girl who joins a metal band with her friends.

Generally, the music industry isn’t a particularly welcoming for women. Most musicians, managers, venue staff, stagehands and label executives are men. I’ve made a lot of close female friends in other bands on the road, because being a female musician really sets you apart; you encounter situations that other people can’t really relate to.

I’ve been denied access to my own dressing room because the venue security thought I was a groupie, and told me I would be “sent for” when the guys in my band were “ready for me.” I’ve been barred from going onstage with my band because I was perceived to be an over-enthusiastic fan. I’ve been at meetings with people who make eye contact with everyone at the table except for me. I’ve been expected to lie when the wives and children of rabidly unfaithful musicians come out to shows — that’s part of the “code.” I’ve had my weight, clothing, hairstyle, shoes — you name it — analyzed and critiqued as though my attractiveness is part of the package and is as open for critical discussion as my singing and songwriting capabilities. I’ve been asked in interviews if I ever want to have children. I’ve been treated as a possible conquest by men in bands who see me as more of a challenge than your “typical groupie.” It becomes tiring. It becomes infuriating.

Although I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting many men on the road who treat female fans, musicians, and crew with respect, I’ve also heard a tour described as a “pirate ship”: a collection of rowdy, lonely guys travelling in a group and feeding off each other. The ladies really are few and far between.

I wrote Boring Girls from the perspective of Rachel, a murderer, with her possible victims being unsavory, difficult, even terrible people. Figuring out a way for readers, and for me, to relate to someone who would actually kill another human being was a challenge. So, I revisited
Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, which is also written from a killer’s perspective and is one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read — it is very interesting when you can somehow drum up sympathy, or empathy, for characters who are fundamentally loathsome.

It was challenging writing Rachel’s character: my life and experiences definitely inform her character, and yet I have nothing in common with her at the end of the day. Even if I like the creepy stuff, I’ve never killed a bunch of people, you know?

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Sara Taylor sings and writes for the Billboard-charting band The Birthday Massacre. She lives in Toronto with her Shetland sheepdog. Her debut novel Boring Girls is published by ECW Press.

When I was a kid, doing a research project for school meant going to the library (walking uphill both ways 16 miles in the snow, of course) to peruse their nonfiction section. The Internet has, of course, changed the way kids do research now. Nonetheless, teachers are finding ways to incorporate tactile books into lesson plans, and publishers and writers have become increasingly creative with educational books.

With each season, it seems that more and more picture books are incorporating nonfiction into elaborate stories or intricate artwork (including recent Scribbles picks The Queen’s Shadow and Elise Gravel’s Disgusting Critters series). Owlkids, longtime publisher of educational books and magazines for children, hit the mark with Wild Ideas ($19, 32 pp, ages 4-8), a collaboration between writer Elin Kelsey, PhD, and Soyeon Kim. The book documents how wild animals use creative means to problem solve (humpback whales blow bubbles to trap fish, sea otters use rocks to crack crabs). Facts are brought to life by Kim’s incredibly ornate 3D dioramas, which use mixed materials to depict the creative potential held within scientific ideas.

Avis Dolphin is a name that I would accuse of being too contrived had it not belonged to a real-life passenger on the Lusitania. Author Frieda Wishinsky revisits the German attack on the ocean liner, which recognizes its 100-year anniversary this May, in Avis Dolphin (art by Willow Dawson, Groundwood Books, $17, 168 pp, ages 8-12). Inquisitive, 12-year-old Avis is the ideal conduit through which this component of the First World War can be reintroduced to a new generation. Wishinsky attempts to add colour to the story by fleshing out Avis and the other passengers of the Lusitania (including both those based on real people, and characters that are completely made up), but the book doesn’t really take off until midway through, when the Lusitania is hit. Avis Dolphin’s strength lies in its ability to prove to young readers that real-life stories can be just as fascinating as fiction.

Gruesome beheading videos and online calls to join the caliphate have become hallmarks of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham, intimidating its enemies and fuelling recruitment efforts. But the Western jihadis whose social media savvy has helped launch ISIS into the global spotlight could one day find themselves facing justice in the International Criminal Court thanks to a legal backdoor that would see their tweets and Facebook posts used against them.

Westminster University Mohammed Emwazi was unmasked as the ISIS terrorist who appears as the group's frontman in videos of hostages about to be murdered. Credit: Westminster University // fo022815-jihadi // Fo030315-jihadi // FO030415-JIHADI

While the ICC has prosecuted war crimes and crimes against humanity around the world since it was founded in 2002, it has not been able to investigate war crimes in Syria and Iraq because they are not among its 123 member states. For the court to investigate a conflict in a non-member country, it requires a referral from the UN Security Council. In the case of Syria, Russia and China have blocked several Western-supported resolutions that would have given the court the ability to intervene.

That leaves the court with one potential option to gain jurisdiction: investigating and prosecuting fighters who are citizens of member countries such as Jordan, Tunisian and even Canada, but have travelled to the region to join the fight.

The potential for finding viable cases to prosecute are significant. The U.S. National Counterterrorism Center estimates that there are about 20,000 foreign fighters there now. And given the high profile of some Western fighters on social media, the chances of finding a good case to investigate are high.

One possible example is the case of Mohammed Emwazi, better known in the media as “Jihadi John,” a British fighter seen in the beheading videos of several Western hostages. Although the actual murders take place off camera, his repeated presence in the widely shared videos and the testimony of released hostages could create a strong case against Mr. Emwazi for war crimes. Any prosecution could not occur until Mr. Emwazi is in custody, but ISIS’s media strategy has already provided much of the evidence that could ultimately be used against him by the ICC.

In an interview in November 2014 with the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the court’s chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda suggested the court is considering using this backdoor approach. It would be an unprecedented move but one that some legal experts believe is necessary to combat the rise of extremist groups and deter foreign fighters from joining the battle.

“The message that really needs to get out to members of ISIS is that accountability is coming,” said Jennifer Trahan, associate clinical professor of global affairs at New York University. “If the prosecutor has enough to go forward on foreign fighters, it should be pursued because the court currently has jurisdiction.”

According to Canadian independent researcher and consultant Mark Kersten, investigating foreign fighters would also serve the court well in its aims to bring accountability for the worst international crimes. “The ICC wants to get involved in Syria and wants to be seen as a relevant and positive actor addressing the atrocities being committed in the civil war,” he says. “That inclination I think has driven it to seek ‘creative’ ways of intervening.”

Although prosecuting fighters through their citizenship is within the mandate of the court, not everyone thinks it is a good idea. Without a Security Council referral, any attempt by the ICC to investigate the conflict in Syria and Iraq could be seen as political rather than a pursuit of justice says Kevin Jon Heller, a criminal law professor at SOAS, University of London.

Jabeur Fathally, an international law professor at University of Ottawa, also sees politics as a potential impediment. “The problem is that even if we resolve some legal questions about the jurisdiction of the ICC other political obstacles will undermine or discourage the ICC.”

One obstacle would be the precedent set by exploiting citizenship in an investigation. Officials and military officers of other non-members states who hold two passports could become targets in future, unrelated cases if this were to go ahead. This could theoretically bring non-member states including the U.S., Russia and China — generally already suspicious of the court — under its jurisdiction.

This approach has already generated controversy. In 2009, the court’s former chief prosecutor suggested investigating an Israeli military officer who held a South African passport and who authorized strikes during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza — many of which were later determined to be civilian in nature. While Israel is not a member state, South Africa is. Just the suggestion that the court could use this loophole to claim jurisdiction over potential Israeli actions was met with immediate political backlash and the investigation never came to pass.

Some think this issue alone will prevent the court from wading in on ISIS, even as gruesome evidence of their crimes continues to flood social media.

Another potential hurdle would be reluctance on the part of member states to turn their citizens over to the court.

For some, however, the possibility of an international solution to the question of what to do with foreign fighters who have left the conflict may be tempting.

“Countries are inclined to protect their own nationals but those who have gone to fight for ISIS and are implicated in atrocities. I don’t see Western countries trying to protect them from exposure,” said Prof. Trahan. “Courageous action needs to be taken by somebody because the crimes are so horrific.”

There’s a scene in season two of Looking, HBO’s recently canceled dramedy, where the main character Patrick — 30, a bit WASP-y and gay — finds himself out of his depth in the personal hygiene section of his local Rite Aid. Anticipating some action during his first real date with a new partner, he anxiously navigates the nitty gritty of planned sex between men in real time.

It’s a scene played for laughs, but Patrick’s self-conscious attempt at nonchalance with the cashier barely covers the awkwardness he feels in the moment. Here is an adult man facing for the first time a situation akin to something most people encounter during puberty. As a generic viewer with some humanity, it elicits some red-in-the-cheeks chuckles. As a gay man, empathy for Patrick is fully triggered by something that feels, above all else, true.

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On social media, the episode drewthe ire of many viewers who rejected the suggestions that a gay man of Patrick’s age would be fumbling through such a basic experience. It’s telling for the response to the show itself, which has largely been met with a grimace and yawn from its key demographic. Despite consistently positive reviews, the greater conversation — driven in large part by gay men — has seen Looking dismissed as boring, off the mark and unrepresentative of the increasingly diverse spectrum of gay life. To many watching, the show simply does not do enough to reflect their lived experiences. The criticism isn’t without merit, but it negates the story being told for the one expected.

At its heart, Looking is not the show about the universal experience of modern life as a gay man many wanted it to be. It was never meant to be. As the creation of Michael Lannan and Weekend director Andrew Haigh, the show instead concerns itself with another under-represented group of people, especially within the gay community itself: men who do not come to being gay comfortably and simply do not identify strongly with or see themselves reflected within the established Gay Community. That, and the roundabout, delayed ways in which those men find their way to something like peace.

Looking concerns itself with another under-represented group of people, especially within the gay community itself: men who do not come to being gay comfortably and simply do not identify strongly with or see themselves reflected within the established Gay Community

Patrick and his friends exist on the fringes of San Francisco’s famously vibrant gay scene and, to be sure, do engage with it at several points throughout the series. But they are never anchored in it the way gay men have traditionally been shown to be in gay-themed film and television. Acknowledged or not, that kind of community comes with a type of privilege that involves a certain buoyancy as part of a collective where wisdom and experience are shared assets.

From that setting, of course the grim realities of preparing for gay sex are mundane and unworthy of coverage in one of the few gay series on television. But what about, as is Patrick’s experience, within the vacuum of stifling family relations that register somewhere between silence and obligation, and render even self acceptance a work long in progress?

Looking breaks new ground in asking us to consider the experiences of out and proud gay men, some of whom perhaps did not burst out of the closet and into the arms of an accepting community. It calmly sidesteps the caricature-ridden sensationalism of successful but ultimately empty forebears like Queer As Folk without dipping to the neutered, cheesecake gayness of the Cams and Mitchells found elsewhere on television today. Instead, the people behind the show conjure flesh and blood characters who feel real; people with diverse backgrounds who think and act like actual humans with ambiguous motivations and baggage to spare. Their stories are in turns heartbreaking, funny and emotionally rich.

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In Looking, the sound of Dom, an under-developed 40-year-old, coming out to an empty cemetery in lieu of the conversation he never got to have with his father evokes the power of catharsis, no matter how delayed. The tangible internal struggle experienced by Richie, the son of Mexican immigrants, while coming to terms with his sexuality in the face of his father’s lack of acceptance warns us of how easily silence breeds resentment. The slow dance of trust-building between Augustine and his HIV-positive boyfriend Eddie beautifully illustrates the many ways in which taking the time to find mutual understanding can heal old wounds.

If the specific parts of Looking’s story have not lived up to the many (understandable, sometimes unfair) expectations levied against it, the series — marked by an effortless realism that at times makes it hard to believe you’re not witnessing it first hand — is an elegant glimpse into a few lives we don’t see often enough in any media, gay-themed or not. Like seeing an image of yourself for the first time, the experience can be jarring, illuminating things you hadn’t acknowledged before.

For those not just looking but really watching, the impressive takeaway from the show —and upcoming television movie! — is universal enough in scope to merit more than a passing glance before it’s gone.

On the evening of Aug. 8, 1993, Showtime aired Body Bags, a 90-minute pilot for what the network hoped would become a long-running horror anthology series in the style of HBO’s Tales from the Crypt. (Needless to say, it did not.) The first instalment, “The Gas Station,” is directed by John Carpenter, and it is a short, perfect film, not a frame out of place across its swift 23 minutes.

Its premise is simple: a young college student, arriving at a small-town Illinois gas station for her first shift as its overnight attendant, finds herself beleaguered by a local mental asylum’s murderous escapee, thought to be lurking, of course, nearby. The story proceeds as you’d expect. What distinguishes “The Gas Station” is Carpenter’s style — his command of form. Sweat-inducing tracking shots, gasp-worthy closeups: on a rote slasher trifle Carpenter brought a kind of mastery to bear. The result is a spasm of virtuosity. It’s bravura horror.

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Bravura horror: we don’t see much of that anymore. What do we see instead? Mid-range studio affairs dulled and flattened by a televisual aesthetic. Haunted-house cheapies whose highest formal aspiration is to make three million dollars look like 30. Or, more alarmingly, those ubiquitous “found footage” pictures, which have relinquished any pretence of style on purpose. Some of these films of have much else to recommend them. But few seem directed with any real sophistication — with what you’d have to call authorial vision. So when one that does emerges it’s only natural to find critics quick to celebrate.

The new horror film It Follows opens theatrically this weekend, nearly a year after premiering to a great deal of acclaim at Cannes last May. Its director, David Robert Mitchell, has proven himself to be a virtuoso: a young auteur with a good eye and, with only two features to his name, an already highly developed style. Hardly surprising, then, that Mitchell has been widely compared to John Carpenter.

Mitchell’s formal command announces itself within seconds. Indeed, it’s made manifest in the opening shot: a striking long take that tracks a teenage girl’s retreat in fright from her suburban front door, a bit of old-fashioned, Halloween-like synthesizer throbbing ominously beneath it. The girl backs away down the smoothly paved road, her terrified eyes pinned wide, as an elder neighbor unloading groceries a few houses away asks if everything is alright. She says she’s fine. Minutes later she turns up dead: sprawled unnaturally in the soft dawn light on the shore of a beach, her left thigh snapped in half like a turkey bone.

Mongrel MediaLili Sepe and Maika Monroe in It Follows

This is not exactly panache on the order of The Shining, but it’s clearly the work of a director more interested in style than most. But why do so few excel in this manner? There are plenty of formally adventurous films inflected to some degree by a horror sensibility. Earlier this week, the website Criticwire polled writers about the best horror films of the past15 years, and the respondents trotted out the candidates you’d expect: David Lynch’s Inland Empire, Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Bravura abounds here, certainly. But these aren’t quite horror films in the traditional sense.

We all know a real horror film when we see one. And the contemporary horror film, as rigidly codified as a classical Hollywood western, affords its practitioners ample opportunity to brandish their facility for filmmaking craft, much in the way that a standard invites the jazz musician to both hone and demonstrate her expertise. In fact it’s precisely because the horror film is so unvarying that the genre furnishes directors with so much creative freedom, counterintuitive though it may seem: the familiarity of convention opens in each new horror movie a margin in which style might flourish.

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Horror used to be the domain of the formalists. Look at the German Expressionists: so extravagant were their aspirations for the genre that they had to invent a new vernacular to accommodate them. The Italians, in the 1970s, had the “giallo,” under whose fashionable aegis auteurs like Dario Argento produced slashers of almost ludicrous flamboyance. Finally America began to yield its vulgar visionaries: Carpenter, yes, but also Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, George Romero, Sam Raimi — the horror fan’s horror directors, exemplars of a disreputable practice. (We can count at least two Canadians among their number: David Cronenberg and Bob Clark.)

It’s these exemplars whose legacy Mitchell has inherited. “I really love horror films and I’ve seen so many,” Mitchell said at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September. “I love so many different kinds, from silent films to classic Hollywood horror.” And the rigidity of horror proves, for Mitchell, central to the genre’s appeal. “I like the idea of taking things that we know and bending them in new ways, making them feel a bit different.” He was drawn in particular to Carpenter — an “amazing director,” he says, whose “compositions are fantastic.” Indeed they are. But it’s telling that of all Carpenter’s virtues it’s his sense of composition to which Mitchell found himself most attracted. Composition: what else, in filmmaking, is so central to form?

The one thing The Walking Dead, which ends its latest terror-filled season this Sunday, has taught us is that deep down, we’re all killers.

Hear me out. Most of us are not Rick Grimes, we’re not Carol Peletier, and our crossbow skills pale in comparison to Daryl Dixon’s. But when push comes to shove and we’re forced to make a choice, we’ll usually make the one that will ensure our survival. Or, so I learned from living in my spider- and mice-ridden apartment three (traumatizing) years ago.

Through friends, I’d found my very first place, a two-room apartment on the second floor of a beautiful Edwardian home directly above my elderly landlords. And it was fine. For a while.

My Dad used to ask me what I’d do when I didn’t have anybody to kill bugs for me, and I’d laugh and say, “I’ll kill them myself!” as though I hadn’t almost driven off the 401 once when a spider showed up on my dashboard. After all, didn’t they know? I was brave! Brazen! I lived in Toronto! Spiders should be afraid of me.

I had done it. It was dead. And I felt alive.

Except they weren’t, because they are spiders. As seasons changed, I learned the walls of my apartment housed the cast of Arachnophobia (minus John Goodman, sadly), and said eight-legged freaks were coming out in full force to celebrate spring. So I kept my rule simple: if they stayed in the corners, we’d be fine. Just don’t come near me. Stay away from my bed. (And other rules I’d say out loud while trying to cleanse my apartment with sage.)

They didn’t listen (again, because they are spiders), and my fear of their presence was eclipsed only by my fear of trying to squish one and it escaping into my closet/sheets/mouth instead. So, we would co-exist peacefully, I thought to myself. Until we stopped.

One night, after turning the lights off and keeping my eye firmly on one particularly large spider in the corner, I turned them back on to get a drink and looked for my friend. But it was gone. Despite our deal it had moved. And it was now directly above my bed, and too high up for me to reach. For at least 30 minutes I contemplated living in peace with another being (who would potentially crawl over me as I slept) and turning into the killer I once bragged I was.

While yelling quietly enough not to wake up my neighbours, I squashed the fool with my newfound killing machine: a Swiffer with a paper towel wrapped around the bottom. I had done it. It was dead. And I felt alive.

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“Felt” being past tense. I learned a month later that no amount of spider-killing will prepare you to kill a mouse, so after my landlords set peanut butter sticky traps for my newest roommate, I threw them away.

A boundary-less ceiling-dweller was one thing, but a character of my favourite kids’ book was another. Killers, it turns out, have their limits.

Even if it means I’ll survive only a zombie apocalypse if said zombies are spiders.

When David Duchovny published Holy Cow last month, it was treated as anything but a load of, ahem, bull. His satirical novel, told from the point of view of bovine heroine Elsie, inspired bad puns such as the one above, fawning profiles, generally glowing reviews and, most importantly, a distinct lack of skepticism.

Gone are the days when a raised eyebrow was the automatic response to an actor-turned-author. Back in 1996, Ethan Hawke’s literary debut, The Hottest State, was met with a priori distaste. Entertainment Weekly crowed, “Acting and writing are such diametrically opposed skills — one puts words in another person’s mouth, the other swallows another person’s words as one’s own.” By 2000, reviewers of Steve Martin’s Shopgirl, although much kinder, still felt bound to ask, as did Publishers Weekly, “but can he write serious fiction?”

Of late, we’ve seen the rise of the would-be celebrity polymath. James Franco, in addition to acting, directing and awkwardly hosting award shows, has penned the story collection Palo Alto (2010) and the novella Actors Anonymous (2014); Molly Ringwald, besides acting, singing jazz and writing an advice column for The Guardian, has published an acclaimed book of short stories (When it Happens to You, 2012). Duchovny’s Holy Cow arrives between his acting on Californication and a debut album slated for later this year. And then there’s actor/graphic novelist/performance artist/dancer Shia LaBeouf, whose varied oeuvre, if nothing else, seems to have distracted people from the fact that as a filmmaker, he’s been a plagiarist.

Farrar, Straus and GirouxHoly Cow

“We’re in a new world, sociologically or culturally, when the work of celebrities is getting the kind of attention that it does,” says Scott Timberg, whose book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, came out this year. In it, he explores how the ecosystem that used to support the work of a middle class of non-celebrity, non-starving artists, especially in the U.S., has collapsed. “It’s not like I’m in theory against a famous person putting out a book of poems or stories, especially if it’s good,” he says. “What I do worry about is when celebrities suck up all the air in the room. Ultimately there’s a finite amount of coverage, and if it all focuses around people who are already famous writing their memoirs or vanity projects, that’s a problem for actual dedicated writers and novelists.”

Our growing devotion to celebrities leads to a willingness to take their creative output in every medium seriously. As the entertainment industry continues to struggle with digital revenue, a varied body of work across media is the artistic equivalent to a diversified, risk-managing portfolio.

But the omnipresence of the A-list can lead to celebrity fatigue, especially for a media-savvy younger generation, such as the young adult readers flocking to Holy Cow. For Jamie Broadhurst, vice-president of marketing at Raincoast Books, the Canadian distributors of Holy Cow, “Booksellers have a very finely tuned bulls–t detector, and sometimes in our business, ‘celebrity’ is not a word you want to attach to a book.” Instead of milking Duchovny’s celebrity when marketing Holy Cow, he says, Raincoast has focused on “the quality of the writing and the reputation of the [publishing] house” — Farrar, Straus and Giroux, American home to the likes of Jonathan Franzen and Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa.

Beyond their celebrity, the likes of Duchovny and Ringwald could be seen as representative of a broader cultural shift, where anyone with a smartphone or a tablet is being encouraged to create and “publish” work in various media. We can all be photographers on Instagram, actors on YouTube, dancers on Vine, and writers on everything from Facebook to WattPad. Entertainment lawyer and literary agent Michael A. Levine, whose clients include artist-author Douglas Coupland, broadcaster-author Kevin Sylvester and lawyer-author Mark Sakamoto, agrees: “A lot of people are multitasking, and they work hard. The digital age makes [us] accept the fact that people can do different things, and are not categorizing.” Of course, he notes, “the problem is that a lot of [what is produced] is crap, and we’ve gone from a situation where there is limited supply and a lot of demand to a point where there is insatiable supply and limited demand.”

So how to make one’s voice heard, especially at a time when the traditional gatekeepers are cutting down on books coverage, and the reviewers that write for them are forced to moonlight due to diminishing pay?

The answer is marketing — and here we come back to the celebrity. Even if Holy Cow has not been trumpeted as “a novel by Fox Mulder,” Broadhurst allows that “Duchovny can reach a large audience because he’s easy to get on a national show — most authors would die to have that kind of exposure.” Such exposure is increasingly vital in a climate where among traditional publishers, according to Levine, “Everything flows through the sales department, so in effect the sales and marketing director is basically a dictator. I’ve had many situations where editors have said to me, ‘I really love it, but I’ve gone to sales and marketing, and they can’t make the numbers work.’ ”

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Inevitably, authorial multitasking now extends to marketing oneself. According to Timberg, this model “doesn’t leave creative people much time to do the thing that they’re supposed to be good at, the thing they’re supposed to be dedicating themselves to. The other problem is that some people are introverts, and a lot of artists — like Thomas Pynchon — are not comfortable being out there flogging their stuff. If you create a culture where you’ve got to constantly be pushing and selling, you’re going to lose a kind of temperament, and that temperament has historically been important for the arts.”

So where’s the hope for the focused, dedicated, one-discipline artist? Maybe, oddly enough, it lies with celebrities: If in music, a tweet by Drake can bring fame to a publicity-shy artist like The Weeknd, celebrity authors could do one better than the blurb and help market their lesser-known, shyer peers. With Duchovny starting another novel, maybe he might spare a thought for his literary stable-mates. “Holy cow, have you herd about the new Pynchon?” It’s worth a try.

CALGARY • If the Alberta government is trying to convince us the province bears a certain resemblance to Target, Thursday’s budget does the job. It bears every sign of crisis but the moving trucks.

The budget hits Albertans with personal income tax hikes and a health-care levy; four cents more for a litre of gasoline; and a 10 per cent price hike for alcohol, in case you think you can drink your way out of this.

There’s a massive operating deficit and a huge drawdown of savings to cover it; gigantic borrowing of nearly $10 billion in one year; serious staff cuts in health care; energy royalties reduced to a minor budget line item.

It’s more like a budget for war than an election.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntoshAlberta is no longer betting on oil alone to keep it afloat

But this is what Premier Jim Prentice hopes to sell the populace in a campaign. If the Progressive Conservatives win their expected 13th straight majority with such a platform, the rest of Canada will find Albertans even goofier than usual.

Alberta now has a progressive income tax in flimsy disguise, with complete exemption under $50,000, a higher rate above $100,000, and a still higher one over $250,000.

Prentice always said he was a progressive. He meant it. Both the income taxes and the health levy are solidly based on income. There are substantial increases in benefits to the poor and low-income families, including a new tax credit.

The income tax rates are still low by national standards, but Albertans won’t compare themselves with Ontarians or Quebecers. They’ll compare what they’re paying now to what’s coming next.

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And there’s no question that in the great middle class, the revenue hikes will have real impact.

The health levy will cap out at $1,000 per taxpayer, ranging up from $200 depending on income level, with those earning under $50,000 exempt. The income tax hikes will take hundreds of dollars per year from most families.

The government’s point, endlessly repeated, is that there’s no longer any alternative to higher taxes, except a savage decimation of core government services. The numbers in this exceptionally detailed budget bear this out.

The operating shortfall in 2015-16 will be a staggering $4.991 billion. That will come out of the contingency fund, technically balancing the budget, but leaving the deflated fiscal pincushion without enough cash to cover the next deficit ($3 billion) in 2016-17.

Total revenue from oil and gas is expected to be $2.8 billion — barely more than half the operating deficit, and $6-billion less than last year.

It’s more like a budget for war than an election.

The borrowing level is plain scary. The province will need $9.7 billion in 2015-16 for Crown corporations and capital spending, and more than $9 billion for each of the two following years.

By 2020, Alberta’s total capital debt will be nearly $30 billion, and annual debt service charges will hit $1.8 billion.

Another change to government reporting makes some comparisons difficult, but operating expenses will be essentially flat at about $42 billion, while total spending is above $48 billion.

It’s more like a budget for war than an election.

The opposition Wildrose party will again call for real spending cuts, rather than tax hikes. But the government, perhaps deliberately, is giving a taste of what that could mean with its own flat-out assault on waste in health care.

Alberta Health Services will take a $286-million budget cut. On top of that, AHS is expected to deal with $450 million in “growth pressures.

The health agency will face all that with 1,700 fewer employees, most of whom are expected to obligingly quit or retire.

Administrators are obviously the target, but nobody in government could explain how this many workers can vanish, not to be replaced, without hurting front-line services.

An election could now be called at any moment, although some PC sources are saying it will be delayed for a week or more, to give the campaigners times to assess the impact of the most radical Alberta budget since Ralph Klein’s effort in 1994.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/don-braid-prentice-budget-marks-the-end-of-alberta-as-we-knew-it/feed/4stdgary-clement10 THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntoshSteve Nash was Canada’s beating heart at Sydney Olympics: No one cared more, and he made the country care, toohttp://news.nationalpost.com/sports/olympics/steve-nash-was-canadas-beating-heart-at-sydney-olympics-no-one-cared-more-and-he-made-the-country-care-too
http://news.nationalpost.com/sports/olympics/steve-nash-was-canadas-beating-heart-at-sydney-olympics-no-one-cared-more-and-he-made-the-country-care-too#commentsFri, 27 Mar 2015 13:00:44 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=727216

Fifteen years have dulled the some of the detail, but the broad strokes of the memory, plucked from the aftermath of a basketball game involving Canada and France at the Sydney Games in 2000, are safely tucked away where they remain a keepsake.

Cover sports long enough, you get your share of moments. I witnessed two Blue Jays World Series victories. I was in Madison Square Garden the night Wayne Gretzky played his last game. I watched pandemonium erupt as Nelson Mandela, who had been released from a South African prison just months before, casually strolled into the boxing venue of the Barcelona Olympics. I was courtside as Michael Jordan drained the final shot of his Bulls career — a 15-foot divine oracle with five seconds remaining — to win a third-consecutive championship.

But of all the athletes and all the events, none trumps what I witnessed of Steve Nash that late September day in 2000.

Nash, who retired from basketball last Sunday, was 26 years old that summer, an young NBA veteran about to begin his fifth year in the league. His two consecutive MVP awards, and their attendant fame, were still years away. Still, he was, along with Todd MacCulloch, the NBA presence on Canada’s national men’s team, and he was without question its beating heart.

Canada opened the Olympic tournament with an assertive victory over host Australia, one that caused heads to begin to swivel. Remember: This nation’s last Olympic medal had come in 1936. Jack Donohue’s Olympic over-achievers from 1976 and 1984 had long before faded from the rear-view mirror. And just two years prior to Sydney, at the world championship in Athens, Canada, minus Nash, was a 12th-place car wreck, its tournament ending amid acrimony and pointed fingers.

Proof soon arrived in Sydney that a revision of some kind was in order. After dispatching Australia, Canadian victories quickly followed over Angola, Spain and, after a setback against Russia, the stage was set for an 83-75 win over perennial power Yugoslavia, the defending world champion, a victory that put Canada in first place in its pool and guaranteed a quarterfinal berth. If it’s true that the Australia win had lifted the eyebrows of armchair observers, Yugoslavia made them spit coffee across living rooms.

The country noticed. Each game, each possession, Nash would bring the ball up court, calmly size up his options and make decisions that confounded opponents and seemed to make his teammates to grow in stature. The game seemed to be his to command, his waterbug signature everywhere. Against Yugoslavia, 6-foot-3 Nash led both teams in scoring, assists and rebounds. Watching him deftly decide when to assert himself and when not was like watching watercolour appear on paper.

Canada, which had watched its athletes largely disappoint at Sydney, was suddenly a medal shot in the Games’ marquee team event. For the first time, fans in Canada were getting up in the middle of the night to watch basketball — the way they routinely did for international hockey, something Nash himself acknowledged and welcomed: He’d waited a long time for his sport to matter in his home country. He knew what was at stake, the pressure, the attendant spotlight. Bring it on.

The quarterfinal was slated against France, which had finished in last place in the tournament’s other pool with a spotty record of 2-3. Canadians, if they were honest with themselves, thought they could taste a final-four berth coming. But two French point guards – one of whom confessed afterward he had prepared for Nash by repeatedly playing against his avatar in a video game, learning his tendencies – shut him off like a tap. The frustration and the despair, writ large on Nash’s face, built until the clock expired: France 68, Canada 63. The air left the balloon. There would be no medal round.

John Lehmann/National Post Each game, each possession, Nash would bring the ball up court, calmly size up his options and make decisions that confounded opponents and seemed to make his teammates to grow in stature.

After the game the fans filtered out to the strains of a haunting, plaintive song by Moby called Porcelain, which had been the soundtrack every post-game of the tournament. I packed and made my way downstairs to the mixed zone – the area where athletes and press are allowed to converge. I reached it just in time to see Nash coming down the tunnel with each of his arms around the shoulders of a teammate.

The teammates – I think it was Rowan Barrett and Sherman Hamilton, but here time has, as I mentioned, faded the details – were literally dragging Nash off the floor. They were because Nash was sobbing so heavily — his chest heaving, the tears streaming, his voice choking – he was unable to walk.

I thought to myself:

He makes millions of dollars to play basketball. This game, one that would pay him nothing, mattered more than any.

The Sydney Olympics was, if you ask me, perfect. The weather was heaven sent, the organization and facilities spot on, the volunteers cheerful, the events stirring. There was a vibe about the place that was simply … good. I’ve never enjoyed going to work as much as I did that two weeks and at its conclusion, well, I didn’t want to go home.

So I didn’t. I hung around Australia. I visited a friend in Adelaide, then travelled to Uluru, or Ayers Rock, in the centre of the country. And I thought a lot about Steve Nash.

AP Photo/Jae C. HongSteve Nash retired from basketball last Sunday.

I’d never seen an athlete care so much, carry so much, as Nash did that day.

As it turned out the consequences of the loss to France weren’t as dire as they seemed. Fifteen years later, the basketball talent coming out Canada today is astonishing. Nash is part of the reason why. A medal will come someday, perhaps soon.

I like what that moment under the arena after that game said about Steve Nash. I like that he wasn’t afraid to care that deeply, risk that much, to be a nation’s hope, a sport’s hope, his teammates’ hope, and to show it.

Once, through email, a man informed me that I was garbage, and once, a woman posted dirt about me to her public social media networks, asking her followers to consider me garbage. Both experiences happened to me in the past year, since I started working for a digital publication. Both experiences prompted a rush of blood to my face and a strong desire to light my laptop on fire. Neither experience convinced me to change anything about my behaviour or myself.

Illustration by Chloe Cushman, for National Post

Ah well—better luck next time. After all, these are just two of the more significant examples in recent memory, to say nothing of the Twitter mentions, direct messages, comments I have learned to dismiss with a careful wave of an uncaring hand. As a person who voluntarily performs a version of my life on our current public record—the Internet, to paraphrase a cliché, never forgets—shaming is a way followers and readers can restore balance, grab a little piece of the platform for their selves. And who am I to stop them?

Shaming has always been a kind of public theatre meant both to correct the target and entertain the onlookers, even before you could simply tweet at the to-be-shamed. It has always been a tool meant to enforce norms, and to regulate any kind of behaviour seen as different or wrong, an indiscriminating qualifier that does not distinguish between bad behaviour and behaviour-currently-seen-as-bad-in-our-culture.

Two timely books ask us to consider the uses and abuses of shame: Jennifer Jacquet asks Is Shame Necessary? in her brief yet substantial volume on the cultural and social history of shame as a punishment and deterrent, while Jon Ronson takes a more practical tact with So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a lively collection of case studies examining the recently (and famously) shamed with a particular emphasis on social media and the Internet.

Both books take great pains to clarify the difference between shame and guilt. Guilt, as an emotion, is private. Shame requires an audience. Guilt, let’s say, is what you feel when you look at your Google search history. Shame is what you would feel if your search history was emailed to everyone you know.

Is Shame Necessary? begins by treating the question as already answered—in the qualified affirmative — and each chapter depicts an instance where shame was properly administered. Jacquet’s interest lies in “the public act of shaming [rather] than the emotion of shame,” a sentiment that weaves its way through the book: the use of shame is not significant in terms of how it makes the recipient feel, or even in how it makes the person doing the shaming feel. Instead, she investigates the effects of shame as a punishment for regulating social norms, advocating the cautious use of concentrated shame at large targets: governments, corporations, and institutions, and the people that comprise them.

As an example, Jacquet describes America’s public conversation over tuna farming practices during the Reagan era. Environmental and animal rights organizations applied pressure and companies responded with “dolphin-safe tuna” after companies like StarKist were exposed for negligent tuna-catching practices that killed millions of dolphins. Other examples of seemingly productive uses of shame include inflatable rats erected by unions during strikes and a plan by the State of California to expose delinquent taxpayers on a public website. The pattern is precise: where bad behaviour and evil people exist, shaming is a corrective force.

Shame is a uniquely perfect punishmentfor the human psyche. We all, to a certain extent, want to be seen and recognized; Shame takes that urge to its cruelest conclusion and exposes both what you’ve done and all the terrible things about you that led to your shame-worthy behaviour. This can include anything from great evil — killing dolphins, the sea’s cutest animal!, is straightforwardly bad — to possessing opinions that differ from the shamer—like the so-called “Gamergate” movement, in which female journalists were overwhelmed with misogynistic messages to shame them into not writing about video games. The appropriate uses of shame are largely dependent on the intentions of the shamer.

In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Ronson begins with the story of Michael Moynihan, a freelance writer who accidentally discovered various fabrications and embellishments in Imagine, a purportedly nonfiction book by then-New Yorker staffer, Jonah Lehrer. Moynihan, a Bob Dylan super-fan, happened to notice Leher had used a quote from the singer he’d never seen before. After performing his own research and pressing Lehrer for the origin of the quote, Moynihan discovered that Dylan had never uttered it. Lehrer had simply made it up. Moynhihan wrote an article pointing out the error, and both his and Lehrer’s lives were changed as a result. Ronson interviews both parties about the experience, and they both feel terrible about it; Moynihan goes so far as to compare the experience to shooting an animal without killing it. “[I]t’s lying there twitching and wants its head to be bashed in and you’re [saying], “I don’t want to be the person to do this.’”

Throughout the book, Ronson introduces us to people who have either spearheaded a public shaming or been the target. He includes the perpetrators and victims of particularly harsh hashtags, a judge from Houston famous for his theatrical sentencing practices intended to shame the guilty, psychiatrists and counselors studying and treating shame in their own peculiar ways. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed has no shortage of stories about people being shamed or doling out shame, particularly, as Ronson never fails to point out, in this post-Twitter, NSA-infused, self-surveilling landscape a generation of thumb-tapping smartphone users have wrought.

Ronson and Jacquet both take shame as a given; shame exists, is used, and will continue to be used, as a social tool for both good and bad ends. Both books are guides, of sorts — what can we can accomplish through shame, what we can learn from shame, and why, of course, we need shame. But relying on shame requires a belief in two opposing principles. First we must accept that human beings could be, if left unchecked and given the chance, inherently bad people who will do bad — maybe evil! — things deserving of public shame; second, we must accept that human beings are inherently good people who will, if given the chance, merit out appropriate punishments to restore order in our world. Shaming is, to Jacquet and Ronson, both inevitable and dangerous, a fire that cleanses if it doesn’t consume — a very big if.

I am not convinced by either of these books that shame is, first, necessary, or that there can ever be a manual for recovering from a public shaming. The potential abuses of shame are too dangerous, given how seldom we interrogate the norms shame is intended to enforce and police. In one chapter, Ronson details the fallout from an overhead joke at a tech conference; two male developers were giggling about the sexualized terms used in a speech, and a woman tweeted a picture of them — “Not cool,” she wrote, “Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles. Right behind me.” — before complaining to the conference organizers. The men were fired for their inappropriate remarks and the woman suffered from a consistent, prolonged period of violent sexual harassment from members of the online forum 4Chan. No one benefited from being shamed in any meaningful, productive way; the results in no way matched the intentions of any parties involved.

The question is not whether shaming is necessary but who shaming is necessary for, who profits and benefits from shame, and why

Here I find the question of motivation to be especially relevant: what does it matter why a shaming occurs? Can the motivation behind a shaming ever be righteous? The question is not whether shaming is necessary but who shaming is necessary for, who profits and benefits from shame, and why. Jacquet and Ronson each include examples of shame gone horribly awry: Jacquet reminds us that William F. Buckley once proposed a mandatory tattoo for people diagnosed with AIDS, and Ronson tells the story of how, when Ralph Nader began lobbying for mandatory seatbelts in cars, General Motors sent sex workers to his local grocery store in an attempt to publicly shame him; a man who has sex, the implication went, shouldn’t be trusted.

As part of his cultural excavation, Ronson visits a team of consultants who offer Google-specific post-shaming services: an “organic” effort to remove evidence of shaming from your public record. Ronson cites the experiences of Lindsey Stone, a young woman who posted a photo of herself making an obscene gesture at the Arlington National Ceremony to Facebook. Veterans organizations rightfully posted it on their Facebook pages to highlight her offensive behaviour; anti-feminists groups, too, seized on the photo as an example of exactly what was wrong with women today. The image became a meme and ultimately led to Stone being fired from her job; she retained the services of Metal Rabbit Media to flood the Internet with positive, genuine tweets and blog posts to push the shameful ones deeper and deeper into the black hole of the Google results pages. In their business, they rely on the cyclical nature of shaming—there’s only so long one person can be shamed before their audience loses interest. The show must go on, so to speak.

Is Shame Necessary? and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed are best read as entertainment and not guidance. Both books move rapidly through stories that made me squirm, or laugh, or want to look away, even just from the words on the page; they mimic the effects of shame even as they demystify it. If shame is theater, I’ve learned, people prefer to assume they’ll be in the audience, not up on stage.

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]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/books/shame-jon-ronson-jennifer-jacquet/feed/0]]>stdTemplate-5colIllustration by Chloe Cushman, for National Posttumblr_nki0qt8Bfy1qkl5tno2_50022571552No trend necessary: Tobias Jesso Jr. and the need to not be coolhttp://news.nationalpost.com/arts/music/no-trend-necessary-tobias-jesso-jr-and-the-need-to-not-be-cool
http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/music/no-trend-necessary-tobias-jesso-jr-and-the-need-to-not-be-cool#commentsThu, 26 Mar 2015 14:22:32 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=727224

Here we are in 2015, and the most hotly tipped act in music is a 29-year-old Vancouverite who plays earnest piano ballads. Evoking the mellow sounds of the early ’70s, Tobias Jesso Jr.’s music is managed by a company focused on up-to-the-minute electronic producers, his U.S. label is full of cool indie acts and he’s been feted and profiled by tastemakers like Pitchfork — but The New York Times and the CBC love him, too. Although everyone talks about his unique back story (of which more later), the most curious thing about Jesso is how he’s crossing the hipster divide.
“I’m not a cool guy,” says the tousle-haired Jesso, folding his lanky frame — billboards advertising his just-released debut album, Goon, note the fact that he’s 6-foot-7 — into an oversized chair in the pleasantly anodyne lobby of his Toronto hotel. “Maybe my friends think I’m cool for being myself, but in the typical world of rock ’n’ roll or indie music, I just don’t have any room for thinking about that stuff.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu1Ko02P7vk&w=640&h=390]

Jesso was, for a brief time, on trend: in his late teens, he played bass for Vancouver dance-rockers The Sessions, who sounded like a mixture of The Killers and Hot Hot Heat; they won a worldwide battle of the bands competition and recorded for two weeks with Bryan Adams and Metallica producer Bob Rock. But the band soon dissolved, and Jesso moved to L.A., where he kicked around as an aspiring songwriter.

After four years, his career had stalled; he and his girlfriend had “tapered off on the love front”; riding his bike, he got blindsided by a Cadillac whose hood ornament went through his hand (“I asked the doctor, ‘Is there any nerve damage?’ He said, ‘Wait and see’ — that’s bedside manner in California”); the bike was stolen; and his mother was diagnosed with cancer. It was time to move home. And from there, things looked up.

Jesso taught himself to play piano at his parents’ house and wrote heartfelt songs — about breakups and leaving L.A. “I’m not much of a writer,” he offers, with no hint of false humility. “So when I’m going to say something, I should probably say something I know — I can’t imagine being very good at making things up.”

His mother recovered, and his demos captivated some of the right people: through a combination of cold-calling and connections, he ended up recording with producers Chet “JR” White (formerly of surf/psychedelic outfit Girls), Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney and Ariel Rechtshaid (Vampire Weekend). They subtly augmented his sparse sound with shy strings, horns, and a sympathetic band. The songs are gently probing earworms; when Jesso’s sings in his plaintive but winsome voice, the effect is somewhere curious between artful and artless.

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At first it’s hard to know what to make of the album’s centrepiece, “Hollywood,” a ballad that starts off starkly, with Jesso holding block piano chords almost uncomfortably long; it sounds as if he’s writing the song and learning to play it at the same time. At the end, he plonks the same chord obsessively, over and over, as horns creep in, buzzing in and out of tune like drunken bees. Apparently the arrangement arose from a “big mistake” come good: Jesso was taking a first pass at the tune so White could get a sense of the piano’s dynamics; he kept slamming the last chord “kind of like a joke.” White gave him a thumbs-up and said, “That’s the take!”

“Half my songs are written on mistakes, man,” says Jesso. It’s not that he doesn’t know what he’s doing — he practices and writes obsessively — but that he’s so committed to being an open book, he lets some of the process of creation seep into the product, whether it be a fluffed piano line or his clearing his throat.

According to Cameron Reed, marketing manager of his Canadian label, Arts & Crafts, Jesso’s appeal “is largely genreless in the way that perhaps Adele is. You can be the coolest large-city urban hipster [or] a soccer mom or a blue-collar guy working on an oil rig, and you’ll still love Adele. I think Tobias has that potential to cross demographics.”

Adele is, in fact, one reason anyone has heard of Jesso: in January, she tweeted a link to his single “How Could You Babe.” Like her, he has a sense of humour: he says he called his album Goon “to counterbalance the record, not leave you with this pretentious tone of, ‘Listen to me and my problems.’ ” But his musical approach is the polar opposite to her consummate professionalism, and it opens him up for even more hipster approval: after all, Adele’s 21 was never reviewed by Pitchfork.

Kevin Van Paassen for for National PostTobias Jesso Jr.

When Jesso hears “Rolling in the Deep” in his hotel lobby’s stereo, he sings along and snaps his fingers. “It’s so good. I love her, too, [because] she’s everywhere.” But Jesso himself doesn’t crave ubiquity. “The artist thing is tough,” he says. “I think other people might be more eager for the things that I shy away from, and the common theme is having to pretend. Having to do an interview and act cheerful when I’m not cheerful — but I also don’t want to be mean. Having to perform when I don’t feel like I’m prepared.”

Appearing on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, with The Roots as his backing band, “was a hard, hard choice, because I didn’t want to live with myself if I wasn’t ready.”

At a recent SXSW performance in Austin, he was forced to restart a song five times because he forgot the lyrics. “That’s a hard thing for me to feel like I’m dragging an audience through,” he says. But when he gets it right, he’s compelling: his sold-out solo Toronto gig this month at the Drake Hotel was accompanied only by the occasional sound of a dropping pin.

Jesso’s dream is for his music to be timeless, like that of Hoagy Carmichael, who while “not the greatest singer,” wrote one of Jesso’s favourite songs, “Georgia on My Mind.” While many people say he’s on his way, citing reviewers’ comparisons to the likes of John Lennon, Jesso vows, “I have no interest in staying in the whole ’70s thing. If I want to continue to be at the front end of something, I can’t just fall into the wave and ride it forever. I just like to see artists who are able to change and not fall into what made them successful or what made people pay attention.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/music/no-trend-necessary-tobias-jesso-jr-and-the-need-to-not-be-cool/feed/0stdvanpaassen03307-220315d.jpgKevin Van Paassen for for National PostLeonid Bershidsky: Prosperity, not theatrics, is the best antidote to Ukraine’s corruptionhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/leonid-bershidsky-prosperity-not-theatrics-is-the-best-antidote-to-ukraines-corruption
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/leonid-bershidsky-prosperity-not-theatrics-is-the-best-antidote-to-ukraines-corruption#commentsThu, 26 Mar 2015 12:53:48 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=726846

During a meeting of Ukraine’s cabinet Wednesday, the head of the country’s Emergency Situations Service and his deputy were handcuffed and led away in front of television cameras as a demonstration of the government’s seriousness about rooting out corruption. While a crackdown is sorely needed in Ukraine, the size of a country’s shadow economy depends less on such theatrics than on economic performance.

The Emergency Situations Service officials in Ukraine, Sergiy Bochkovsky and Vasyl Stoietsky, are accused of accepting kickbacks when purchasing equipment for their service. Although Ukraine has passed laws to make government procurement more transparent, the Interior Ministry claims the entire leadership of Bochkovsky’s service, including heads of regional departments, was involved in the scheme.

The current Ukrainian government came to power on an anti-graft platform after the uprising against former President Viktor Yanukovych’s corrupt regime. Now it has to convince creditors that it is fixing a moribund economy in which the shadow sector accounts for as much as 50 percent of official output. The story that Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko has been telling on a recent foreign tour is that the country arrests three to five corrupt officials a day, and that its newly- created anti-corruption agency is staffed with 700 people on salaries commensurate with those of their Western counterparts.

Ukraine has to convince creditors it is fixing a moribund economy in which the shadow sector accounts for as much as 50 percent of official output.

In choosing this noisy, TV-friendly way of fighting corruption, Ukraine follows the example of Georgia and Poland in the 2000s, as well as the more recent experience of Romania, where the head of a European Union-backed anti-corruption agency was arrested on graft charges this month. A crackdown on tax fraud in Romania helped identify more that $3 billion in unpaid taxes, about 1.1 percent of economic output. In the process, 1,130 people, including former officials, have been hauled off to prison.

Such spectacles, however, invariably increase perceptions of corruption. Romania was ranked 69th out of 174 nations on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index last year, down from 43rd in 2013, before the campaign started. Poland, which also formed a high-profile anti-corruption bureau with broad powers and did its best to publicize arrests, also managed to convince its citizens that it had a bribery problem: In 2013, 82 percent of Polish respondents to a Eurobarometer survey said corruption was widespread in their country, and 92 percent said bribing officials and using connections was the easiest way to obtain certain public services.

Do these methods also work to shrink the so-called non- observed economy? That’s far from certain.

The most widely used estimates of countries’ shadow economies are based on the methodology developed by Friedrich Schneider of Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. It extrapolates the biggest parts of the underground economies — undeclared work for cash payments and income under-reporting, which can both result from corruption — from a range of official indicators. I have compared data that Schneider and the consulting company AT Kearney (with Schneider’s help) obtained for European economies in 2003 and 2013 (the latest year for which such data are available), and found that shadow economies as a percentage of gross domestic product shrank everywhere in that 10-year period.

Romania saw the steepest decline, almost 6 percentage points, even before the highly public anti-corruption campaign began. That may simply be because the initial level was one of the highest in Europe: Bulgaria and the Baltic states, which had especially large shadow economies in 2003, also showed relatively big declines. In general, however, shadow economies in Europe have been shrinking at similar rates, with no government able to claim that its policies proved more successful than its neighbours’.

That may be because the size of the shadow economy is highly correlated with per capita GDP: In 2013, the correlation coefficient was -0.87. The wealthier a country, the smaller its shadow economy in terms of GDP share. In several papers, Schneider suggested that increasing economic prosperity makes it unnecessary for people to supplement their incomes in the shadow economy. That explanation works well for bribes, too.

It’s pointless to pay the employees of an anti-corruption bureau high salaries when other public employees make almost nothing officially and derive most of their income from slush funds or corrupt schemes, as is too often the case in Ukraine. Televised arrests are probably less helpful in reducing the size of the shadow economy than deregulation, which cuts the number of public services for which bribes can be extracted. And getting housewives and tourists to spy on tax-evading businesses, as Greece recently suggested, won’t work as well as making the taxation level compatible with these businesses’ survival.

In the end, light regulation and growing prosperity are the best ways to make citizens more law-abiding. Turning law enforcement into a spectacle doesn’t really serve that goal.

Bloomberg

Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer.

Since 2001, when R&B in its contemporary form began to shimmer before the public eye, American audiences have been treated to one or two “street dance” films per year — each slinking into multiplexes to crowds as vast as their reception is cool. In that their characters don’t sing, these movies aren’t musicals in the classical sense; they’re more like kung-fu pictures whose fights have been exchanged, with just as much an emphasis on choreography, for elaborate feats of popping and locking.

The plot is always the same: a young man, usually disadvantaged, must use dance to triumph over a minor adversity, by winning in a contest the funds needed to save a studio from foreclosure, say, or by persuading the orthodox parents of a neighborhood girl that street dancing affords their daughter valuable freedoms of feeling and expression. Often one or more of the heroes will belong to a prestigious dance academy whose traditional methods are made to seem hopelessly old-fashioned and obsolete. And almost always the film concludes with a galvanic final number before which any remaining sense of conflict instantly melts.

I grinned happily when, in the middle of the most recent Step Up sequel, our troupe of aspiring dancers found themselves squaring off in the first round of a televised competition against the longtime friends who recently betrayed them — precisely the sort of symmetry the street dance movie can’t seem to help but eagerly arrange. A story, in such a film, need only provide the sturdy framework it’s left to dance to ornately furnish. The star-crossed lovers, the underdog’s near-defeat: this is a genre that thrives on archetype, that embraces cliche. It frees the street dance film to concentrate its powers of originality and exuberance on what counts: dance itself.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hee38-NV11E&w=640&h=390]

The street dance film, of course, emerged alongside hip hop and its corollary rituals, and in its earliest incarnation the object of the genre was at least partly journalistic — to chronicle, and perhaps further popularize, a gathering trend. (And it was effective: Anthony Booth and Erskine Harden’s Anatomy of Hip-Hop declares 1984’s proto-breakdance movie Beat Street “a very important part of hip-hop,” crediting its success with launching a once-niche music into the mainstream.) Doubtless in every Step Up or You Got Served there lingers the residual influence of a Wild Style or a Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo; their impress left on dance culture is indelible, and every film since that takes dance as its subject remains to some extent in their debt.

Next week, at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, the Versus series returns with a hotly anticipated “Dance-Off” edition, measuring two much-beloved mid-’80s dance films against one another by putting their respective merits to a popular vote. On one side, surely poised for victory, stands Emile Ardolino’s Dirty Dancing, starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey; on the other, handily outclassed, is Footloose, starring Kevin Bacon and directed by Herbert Ross. Hardly comparable as motion pictures, but the pairing is instructive. Together they reveal what the street dance film really looked like in its infancy — and from where films like Step Up secretly emerged.

HandoutDirty Dancing

Set in 1963, and concerned not with breaking or popping but with mambo at a Catskills resort, Dirty Dancing may not seem, from a cursory glance, like a street dance film at all. But the movie shares much in common with the genre — most of all its presiding affection for the spectacle of dance. The conventions that in 20 years would be familiar as hallmarks of the street dance film are already here fully formed: what is Swayze’s Johnny Castle if not a disadvantaged young man made triumphant by the power of dance? What is Grey’s Baby Houseman if not the daughter of orthodox parents who must be convinced of her pastime’s liberating elan? And how does the film conclude, if not by resolving everything in a grand spasm of electrifying dance?

The story told by Dirty Dancing does not have much to recommend it. Or rather, what it has to recommend it is its conventionality: as in a film like Step Up, it seems fixed in place, appealingly unobtrusive, to be ornamented by Swayze and Grey’s ecstatic moves. And how ecstatic they are. It’s hardly surprising for a movie of this sort to shoot its dance sequences like sex scenes, teeming with a vigorous sensuality. But sex-like dance scenes aren’t enough to satisfy Dirty Dancing. No, it feels compelled to thrust a bit further: its sex scene is like a dance. The lubricious air of every street dance movie since can be traced back to Dirty Dancing’s wafting steam.

Cliche abounds in Footloose, naturally — not merely in the routine struggle of the rebel who finds himself pitted against authority, but in the manner of the small-town locals who make it their business to keep the new kid down. From Footloose, the street dance film learned to render dance a symbol of freedom: much easier, certainly, to take a frivolous activity with high seriousness if the activity is emblematic of independence. The Step Up series has come to seize upon dance as a practice roughly as important as eating or breathing — take it away and you take away life! — and it all began with John Lithgow’s scowling Reverend Moore, marshaling the law on behalf of the lord to ban dancing.

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It’s easy to care about something when it’s been denied someone: you could just as well imagine a movie about a young man nobly fighting to restore a town’s right to play miniature golf, if the right villain were in place to abhor it. But that sense of the vaguely ludicrous may be part of the genre’s appeal. The street dance film by its very nature makes more of its subject than anyone ought reasonably to feel is necessary, conferring upon dance an aura of the heaven-sent. At their best these films compel you through the sheer joy of their spectacle to concede the point: dance really is something sublime.

TIFF’s Versus series, Swayze vs. Bacon, runs March 31 to April 3 at the Bell Lightbox in Toronto.

Most literary novelists, when asked about films of their work, will sigh and explain they’re powerless. Rare is the adaptation that lives up to anyone’s expectations, and the triumph-to-turkey ratio is dismayingly low — unless you’re Dennis Lehane.

The Boston-born, Los Angeles-based writer speaks casually of his 2012 novel, Live by Night: “It was sold to DiCaprio because Leo has great taste … And [his company] ended up getting into a deal with Ben to direct it.” “Ben” is Ben Affleck, who previously adapted Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone in 2007. Before that, in 2003, Clint Eastwood adapted Mystic River (for which Sean Penn and Tim Robbins won Oscars for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively), and in 2010, Martin Scorsese helmed the DiCaprio-starring Shutter Island. Last year, the Lehane adaptation The Drop featured James Gandolfini’s final performance, and yielded the writer’s one true film-related regret: that he and the late Sopranos star “played phone tag and never met.”

Lehane knows he’s on an incredible run. “The only thing I take credit for,” he says, “is that I’m very select about who I sell to.” But he also writes widely acclaimed fiction that balances the drive of crime novels with the scope of ambitious literary work, centered on the kind of arrestingly conflicted characters that actors like to play. A case in point is Joe Coughlin, the protagonist of both Live by Night and the just-published World Gone By; together with The Given Day (2008), where he appears as a boy and his father is a police captain, the books form a saga of American law and disorder from the Boston police strike of 1919 to corrupt Tampa Bay during the Second World War. At the start of Live by Night, Joe is a young outlaw robbing criminals and banks alike; as World Gone By opens, he’s the consigliere of a Florida crime syndicate tied to the New York mob. Joe dislikes bloodshed and donates to charity as if he could offset his crimes like greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, he’s haunted by his gang’s misdeeds.

On the phone from a book-signing tour stop in Phoenix, Ariz., the 49-year-old Lehane says the title World Gone By is derived from “the sense that you get when you reach middle age: ‘The world I knew is being swept away.’” Joe, now a father like Lehane himself, reflects on what values he might pass on to his ten-year-old son. As a historical novel, World Gone By portrays the Second World War as what Lehane calls “the last innocent time” in America. It’s also superior genre fiction, and disillusionment, he says, is at the heart of every gangster story: “an independent operator ultimately becomes or is destroyed by the corporation — it’s a metaphor for capitalism.” Meyer Lansky, real-life “accountant” for the Luciano family, represents what Lehane calls “the clipped business side of the mob”; when Lansky arrives in Florida, Joe has to make difficult negotiations between ties to family and friends and the demands of the empire he’s helped to build — all the while investigating a plot to assassinate him.

William MorrowWorld Gone By

There’s also a quasi-mystical dimension to the novel: Joe often sees the ghostly apparition of a little boy, and he visits a devilish associate’s lair, which Lehane calls “an almost Boschian hell.” Says Lehane, “Page after page is about carnage and the people that we leave behind, and ‘Is there something beyond all this?’ Part of me knew that I was writing a book about mortality, and the other part of me was fighting it.” He hated his original draft because he was avoiding difficult decisions about some of his characters; in the end, he was guided by his “greatest gift,” an “incredible “bullshit meter” that “retards the writing if I go too far down [one] path.”

He recalls his time writing for seminal TV series The Wire, and being assigned the episode where — decade-old spoiler alert — everyone’s favourite character, mouthy stick-up artist Omar, gets murdered. “I wasn’t happy. I said, ‘If I do this, there has to be no dignity to it.’ There has to be something really ignominious about his death, because that’s what we’re saying about the street. There’s no blaze of glory and David Bowie singing ‘Heroes’ at the end, as you die. It’s some little kid comes up and pops you on the back of the head when you’re buying a pack of cigarettes.”

Similarly, Lehane demands that events in his books play themselves out in an “authentic,” self-consistent way. When he’s at work, he says, “I’m aware of this one amorphous reader; for some reason, they’re sitting in a Victorian, and I signed this contract with them that I would never phone it in. But what I didn’t promise them was Mystic River 7.”

Nor did he promise them a fourth book in the Coughlin series, tempting as it may be. His next project is a trilogy set in Boston — “because I’m homesick, it helps me write in a slightly richer vein” — in 2008, “about a cold-case cop who trips over a case that he wants nothing to do with, but that his conscience won’t allow him to let go of.” It will also look at how the financial meltdown ushered in a “new gilded age.”

Lehane likes to quote crime-writing legend Donald E. Westlake: “A novelist is God, and a screenwriter is God’s tailor.” In the latter capacity, he is beavering away on various screenplays and TV shows — including an adaptation of the Irish crime series Love/Hate set in Oahu, and a Shutter Island prequel series for HBO. But novels keep pulling him back in: “People who’ve had long careers in Hollywood, suddenly after they’ve made all their money, try to write books. Because for better or for worse, once you’ve batted the ball back and forth with your editor, it’s over. If somebody says, ‘Why did you have the character do that?’ ‘Because I wanted them to do it.’ ”

“Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his classic paean to American postwar self-indulgence, “the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether.” It would be hard to argue against the notion that Thompson’s gonzo alter-ego, Raoul Duke, could stand as the poster boy for a postmodern Dionysian debauch: even in the brief excerpt above, he hits two out of three in hedonsim’s classic trifecta, and the very invocation of Las Vegas, the city of sin, at least implies sex, making for a perfect trio.

Thompson was undeniably hardcore, as Zoe Cormier notes at about the midpoint in her new examination of the scientific underpinnings for the human pursuit of pleasure. Cormier mines E. Jean Carroll’s biography of Thompson, reprinting a schedule of a typical day in the writer’s life: Thompson would awake at three o’clock in the afternoon and enjoy a glass of Chivas and a Dunhill with the morning papers. The next seven hours would be occupied with a cornucopia of booze, cigarettes, and cocaine; by midnight, he was apparently ready to write.

Unlike Thompson, Cormier is not interested in pleasure for its own sake, or as a means of countering the “fear and loathing” that informs the existential malaise of being human. Cormier wants to investigate the scientific and evolutionary reasons behind our polymorphous perversity, the “biological root that unites sex, drugs and music to the exclusion of all other hedonistic joys.” (Spoiler alert: there “probably isn’t one.”)

The author is a member of the U.K. organization Guerilla Science, which attempts to bring matters of chemistry and biology out of the stuffy confines of academic laboratories and make them fun and engaging for a general audience. In this, she has chosen what should be a surefire winner in terms of subject: the lure of the illicit hangs over her entire book, with its sense, from the title on down, that the text will delve into the kind of naughtiness that should offer at the very least titillation and a healthy dose of embarrassing edginess. Though, to be fair, in a post–Fifty Shades of Grey world, it takes a bit more effort to startle or shock readers: Cormier attempts it at one point by including a picture of a short-beaked echidna possessed of a double-pronged “hemipenis.” This occurs in a subsection titled “Sperm Bombs.”

Cormier’s modus operandi is to cloak her science in insouciance and large swaths of winking humour. So, for example, she writes that “medical treatments of the vulva were described in the works of Hippocrates ,Celsus, Galen, and – linguistically most pleasing – Soranus.” With a straight face, she declaims, “Joking aside, sexual trysts with horses can be far from funny.” In describing the recipe for Coca-Cola, famously once laced with cocaine, Cormier points out that the drink still contains elements of the coca leaf, “which might explain why it tastes better than Pepsi.” And she refers to the “endearingly naïve” attempt by John Major’s Conservative government in Britain to outlaw raves, described in the legislation as “assemblies paired with ‘repetitive beats.’”

There is a strain of moralism that runs through some of the sections devoted to drugs and – especially – alcohol

This overall tone is inviting, and often tinged with a pleasing irreverence (Thomas de Quincey is described as an “indolent posh boy”). However, the writing often veers too far into conversational rhythms, resulting in a lack of attention on a line-by-line level. Metaphors are repeated or badly mixed – alcohol “moors into the harbours of serotonin’s bays, which already generously accept the hallucinogens LSD and psilocybin with open arms.” In the next paragraph, alcohol is also described as both “promiscuous” and a “nimble chemical ninja.” In other cases, the writing is simply unclear: “Rock still serves as the foundation for many forms of music today” is a careless syntactical structure in a section devoted to rock and roll music (the sentence refers to stone as a physical substance, not to a specific musical genre).

But most distressing of all is a strain of moralism that runs through some of the sections devoted to drugs and – especially – alcohol. Cormier cites the death of Amy Winehouse as evidence that “not only is alcohol a drug, it is dangerous. Post-mortem analysis proved the singer only had alcohol in her system at the time of her death. No heroin. No crack. Just booze.” There is no similar acknowledgement that the “barrels of caffeine” the author admits to subsisting on in university could also have deleterious health effects, and even nicotine gets off relatively unscathed by comparison.

Tom Waits is presented as an interesting example of a musician whose output became noticeably more experimental only after he gave up drinking (his marriage to collaborator Kathleen Brennan, unacknowledged by Cormier, was equally significant), and Frank Zappa is heralded for producing some of the 20th century’s most off-the-wall recordings despite the musician himself being “unremittingly sober.” None of these observations are wrong, but they do seem somewhat out of place in a volume putatively devoted to the scientific roots of hedonism and pleasure for its own sake. It’s one thing to acknowledge the dangers of consumption, quite another to take up the mantle of a temperance society proselytizer, especially in the middle of a book entitled Sex, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll. Whatever would Hunter S. Thompson have said to that?

* * *

Steven W. Beattie is the proprietor of a literary blog, shakespeareanrag.com

Alberta Premier Jim Prentice’s televised speech to the province Tuesday was a dance of the veils meant to keep eyeballs popping as budget day nears. The reported $10,000 cost is certainly fair, if you happen to like mystery writing.

After two months of talk that spending will be cut, the biggest boggler from the premier was this: “The budget starts with the premise that we need to get our costs under control,” Prentice said.

“And one of the things you will see in the budget, in fact our projection for the next three budgets, is holding the line on government expenditures.

“Holding the line on spending in a growing province is truly a cut.”

But, but …”holding the line” is not what they said before. Not even close.

In February, Finance Minister Robin Campbell said the government was looking at absolute cuts of five per cent from current spending. The government hoped to trim $2 billion overall.

Dazzled, I asked Finance Department officials if this truly meant a real cut from today’s spending level. The answer was unambiguous — yes! — and they were damned proud to say it.

Compared to that, “holding the line” in Thursday’s budget will sound like heaven to public employees, every player in the MUSH sector (municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals), as well as Albertans who count on government services.

It’s tempting to conclude the whole thing was a setup; the PCs crying wolf in the face of a beagle. This kind of strategy is as old as Alberta politics.

The reason for the shift may not be so simple, though.

As the economic wreckage of US$45 a barrel oil becomes clearer every day, and job losses spread everywhere, the solution Prentice wanted at the beginning of February may look dangerous at the end of March.

The danger is a full-blown recession created by oil prices but seriously worsened by a government sucking further billions out of the economy. That perception could badly hurt the PCs if it runs loose in the looming election campaign.

And that’s coming down fast. Randy Dawson, who ran the hugely successful Stelmach PC campaign in 2008, and saved the Redford one in 2012, confirmed Tuesday that he will be the Progressive Conservative campaign manager.

He said in an e-mail he’s “taking a leave of absence from Navigator if or when a campaign begins.”

Dawson is a close friend and confidant of the premier who helped his leadership campaign.

Navigator, where he’s managing principal, has come up in the legislature again this week for lobbying the government on behalf of two clients, including the town of Okotoks. The company says there’s no conflict because it doesn’t work for the government.

Other budgetary hints tumbled out Tuesday. In the legislature, Advanced Education Minister Don Scott said “there will be no imminent changes to tuition in Alberta.”

Campbell positively thundered a refusal to raise corporate taxes, in response to questions from Cal Dallas, a fellow PC and decommissioned minister who will be retiring.

Dallas asked Campbell if he wants to be seen “in the pocket of big corporate Alberta.” This was a puffball question with a rock in it.

As expected, Prentice signalled a return to some kind of personal health-care payment. “The revenue will start small but it will grow over three years,” he said Tuesday evening.

That was the only detail of tax increases, although Prentice did say “we will ease the burden on working families.” That suggests a new burden of some kind.

The premier painted a wonderful future several years down the line, when 25 per cent of energy revenues, and then 50 per cent, will go into the Heritage Fund every year. Savings will climb, the budget will balance, and the debt will be paid off.

The promises sound wonderful today, just as they have in most budgets since 2009.

Thursday’s new version will give many more details. But as the PCs begin to wobble a bit, Albertans have every right to their hard-earned skepticism.